(And yes, I know there are second marriages where the couple decides not to make a big deal about the wedding.Just know that these marriages fail two-thirds of the time also!Alas, most of the time, it doesn’t, according to this study by Randy Olson, which looks at certain factors in how long marriages last: The charts on the linked page talk about correlation, not causation, which is an important distinction.In other words, spending a ton of money on your wedding will not CAUSE you to break up, but it happens to correlate with higher divorce rates. People with more education are more likely to get married, to use birth control, to delay marriage, to come from functional families, and to make more money. wedding sites, jewelry stores and TLC shows, all have two things in common: hyping up the materialist aspect of marriage and, of course, love... To see if wedding propaganda played any part in helping marriages last, two Emory University professors conducted a survey called "'A Diamond is Forever' and Other Fairy Tales: The Relationship between Wedding Expenses and Marriage Duration." After surveying a sample of straight married couples this past summer and studying their marital habits, satisfaction and age at each part of their relationship milestones, they found that wedding logistisics (other than love) do matter, but not in the way you'd expect.

The chart below shows how the likelihood of breaking up changes as time goes by for straight and gay couples, both married and not. For same-sex married couples, the break-up rate falls from roughly 8 percent for those who have been together for 5 years to under 1 percent for those who have been together for at least 20 years.

“We know a lot more about the relationships that worked out than the ones that didn’t,” said Rosenfeld.

“The way the census and other surveys tend to collect data just doesn’t produce a very good picture.

Couples that went to religious services and those that went away on a honeymoon had lower chances of divorcing.

According to the findings, couples who went on a honeymoon were 41 percent less likely to divorce, while those who never attend church are twice as likely to divorce.